Quantum computing is showing great promise of revolutionizing our understanding of nuclear, atomic and molecular structure – i.e. obtaining forefront solutions in non-relativistic quantum many-body theory.  A question naturally arises whether quantum computing can also solve for the structure of the mesons and the baryons, the hadrons, that are governed by strongly-interacting relativistic quantum field theory.

I will first introduce some of the key elements of quantum computing.  Then, following previous work on the light mesons as a relativistic bound-state problem in the nonperturbative Hamiltonian formalism, I will present a first step towards answering this question.  In particular, I will show how to achieve initial solutions for hadron structures on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices within the basis light-front quantization (BLFQ) approach.  This demonstration employs the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) and its variants to find the low-lying mass spectrum of the light meson system and its corresponding light-front wave functions (LFWFs).  Based on these LFWFs, one can then investigate the structure of these mesons through their decay constants, parton distribution amplitudes (PDAs), and parton distribution functions (PDFs). Initial results will be compared with those from experiment and with results obtained on classical (digital) computers.